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OLD CHINATOWN 


A BOOK OF PICTURES BY 
ARNOLD GENTHE 


Er TEXT BY 
WILL IRWIN 


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NEW YORK 
MITCHELL KENNERLEY 
MCMXIII 
PHOTOG. 
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COPYRIGHT, 1908 BY 

ARNOLD GENTHE om 
COPYRIGHT, 1972). e7 8 

MITCHELL KENNERLEY 


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A FEW OF THE PICTURES IN ‘THIS 
MAY BE RECOGNIZED AS HAVING 


f THEIR FIRST APPEARANCE IN AN 
VOLUME PUBLISHED IN 1908 


DeMAS: 


OLD CHINATOWN 


PICTURES 


New Year’s Day in Chinatown Frontispiece 

PAGE 
Little Plum Blossom 2 
On the Ruins (April 1906) 3 
On Dupont Street 7 
Two Little Maids from School 7 
Marketing II 
The Alley. 13 
The Grocery Store ts 
Waiting for the Car 17 
In Holiday Dress 1g 
Their First Photograph a1 
At the Corner of Dupont and Jackson Streets 23 
Carrying New Year’s Presents pts 
A Proud Father a7 
The Chinese Cook 31 
The New Toy 33 
The Street of the Gamblers (by night) a6 
The Lily Vendor 277 
An Afternoon Siesta 39 
The Airing AI 
The Street of the Slave Girls 43 
The Street of Painted Balconies 47 
The Tinkers AQ 
The Morning Market SI 
Fish Alley x 
Dressed for a Formal Visit 55 
Doorways in Dim Shadows i, 
Passers-by 59 
Friends 61 


[ vat | 


OLD ‘CHINATOWN: Pl C i pi aee 


PAGE 
On Portsmouth Square 66 
A Corner Crowd 69 
Children were the Pride, Joy, Beauty, and Chief 
Delight of the Quarter 71 
In Holiday Finery ae 
Tiny Yellow Flowers of the World vA 
A Native Son v7 
Brothers and Sisters 79 
A Picnic on Portsmouth Square SI 
The Children’s Hour 83 
The Day of the Good Lady Festival 85 
Fleeing from the Camera ; 87 
An Afternoon Airing gI 
A Holiday Visit 93 
Paying New Year’s Calls 95 
In Front of the Joss House 97 
No Likee 99 
He Belong Me IOI 
The First Born 103 
A Holiday 105 
Little Ah Wu 107 
A Goldsmith’s Shop 109 
Dressed for the Feast 115 
The Butcher 117 
The Vegetable Peddler 11g 
The Fish Peddler 121 
A Slave Girl in Holiday Attire 123 
A Merchant 125 
Young Aristocrats 127 
Pipe Dreams 129 
The Street of the Gamblers 139 
The Opium Fiend 141 
The Wild Cat 143 
Dressed for a Visit 145 
Reading the Tong Proclamation 147 
A Family from the Consulate ? 149 


[ viii | 


Preeti’ NATOWN PICTURES 


PAGE 
Children of High Class ISI 
A Corner on the Hillside 153 
The Devil’s Kitchen 157 
New Year’s Day before the Theatre 159 
The Cellar Door 161 
The Devil’s Kitchen (by night) 163 
Boys Playing Shuttlecock 165 
The Crossing 168 
Rescued Slave Girls 171 
Little Tea Rose 173 
Returning Home 175 
The Chinese Salvation Army 177 
The Balloon-Man 179 
A Stroll on the Plaza 181 
Buying New Year’s Gifts 183 
In Softly Gaudy Colors PASE 
Loafers kako ye 
The Pipe-Bowl Mender 189 
The Sword Dancer 19I 
The Paper Gatherer 193 
The Sign of the Pawn Shop 7 195 
The Shoe Maker 197 
The Toy Peddler 199 
The Fortune Teller 201 
After the Fire 1906 203 
An Unsuspecting Victim 205 


The Little Mandarin 209 


CHINATOWN 


FOREWORD 


My Dear Dr. GeNTHE: — Long before I knew 
who you were, I used to mark you in the shadows 
and recesses of Chinatown, your little camera half- 
hidden under your coat, your considering eye and 
crafty hand of the artist alert to take your shy and 
superstitious models unawares. Later, it was my 
privilege to follow you sometimes — to watch you 
playing your Germanic patience against their Chinese 
patience, to marvel at you, in dark room and studio, 
working with those mysterious processes by which 
you— more than any other man alive — have 
made art out of the play-time snap-shot. Now, 
after the great disaster, all that you have saved of 
your work of a decade is this same picture record 
of old Chinatown at which you worked so lovingly. 

In the summer of steel and steam drills and heroic 
enthusiasm — the summer of rebuilding — you and 
I passed through the new, clean Chinatown. It 


[3] 


OL DC EL TINASsT OWN. 


was a clear, sea-scented night, I remember, and very 
late. We stopped beneath the ruins of Old St. 
Mary’s. The new-rising city, like the old one 
in dim, suggestive contour— as an adult face is 
like its childish counterpart — stretched out at our 
feet. Where the vivid carouse and romance of 
Dupont and Kearny Streets had been, a black hol- 
low, mysterious, awful, as though the Pit had taken 
Hell’s Half Acre back to itself; beyond, a wall of 
steel skeletons and gaunt, windowless towers. The 
scattered lights, placed where never lights would 
be in finished and inhabited structures, gave a 
dreadful air of strangeness and desolation to this 
city vista. I stood as one who sees spirits. And 
you spoke: 

“Rubber boots and kettles, overalls and blankets 
in the shop windows — and we have still to call it 
Chinatown!”’ You had been looking backward, I 
perceived, as I had been looking forward. So, with 
the skeleton of St. Mary’s roof creaking above us 
in the night wind, we talked about that little city 
of our love, Chinatown. “No, it’s gone,” said 
I; “‘and beauty, or at least such beauty as they 
know, cannot live in.Class A buildings.”’ You, like 
a true partizan, fell to defending as soon as you 
found me agreeing with your criticisms. “ They 
won’t remain Class A for long,” you said. “‘ The 
Chinese will make them over somehow. They can 
no more live in inappropriate ugliness than we in 
dirt.” Yet we both sighed for the Chinatown which 
we knew, and which is not any more except in the 
shadowing of your films. 

You, the only man who ever had the patience to 


[4] 


Pani On DlG EF NoT TE 


photograph the Chinese, you, who found art in the 
snap-shot — you had been making yourself uncon- 
sciously, all that time, the sole recorder of old 
Chinatown. I[ but write as a frame for your pic- 
tures; I am illustrating you. If, in these writings, 
I use the past tense, I do not mean to imply that 
our Californian Chinese have changed their natures 
or their manners. Much of what I describe here 
has survived, and much more will prevail. It is 
just that your lenses and plates record only the 
past; and, I, embroidering your work, have tried 
to keep in tone. 


WILL IRwIN. 
1908. 


CHAPTER ONE 


/ROM the moment when you 
crossed the golden, dimpling bay, 
whose moods ran the gamut of 
beauty, from themomentwhen you 
sailed between those brown-and- 
green headlands which guarded 
the Gate to San Francisco, you 
heard always of Chinatown. It 
was the first thing which the 
guides offered to show. When- 
ever, in any channel of the Seven 
Seas, two world-wanderers met 
=4 and talked about the City of 
ven Adventures, Chinatown ran like a thread 
through their reminiscences. Raised on a hill- 
side, it glimpsed at you from every corner of 
that older, more picturesque San Francisco which 
fell to dust and cinders in the great disaster of 1906. 
From the cliffs which crowned the city, one could 
mark it off as a somber spot, shot with contrasting 


[7] 


OLD CHINATOWN 


patches of green and gold, in the panorama below. 
Its inhabitants, overflowing into the American quar- 
ters, made bright and quaint the city streets. Its 
exemplars of art in common things, always before 
the unillumined American, worked to make San 
Francisco the city of artists that she was. For 
him who came but to look and to enjoy, this was 
the real heart of San Francisco, this bit of the mys- 
tic, suggestive East, so modified by the West that 
it was neither Oriental nor yet Occidental — but 
just Chinatown. 

It is gone now — this Old Chinatown — but in 
a newer and stronger San Francisco rises a newer, 
cleaner, more healthful Chinatown. Better for 
the city —O yes—and better for the Chinese, 
who must come to modern ways of life and health, 
if they are to survive among us. But where is St. 
Louis Alley, that tangle of sheds, doorways, irregular 
arcades and flaming signs which fell into the com- 
position of such a marvelous picture? Where is 
the dim reach of Ross Alley, that romantically 
mysterious cleft in the city’s walls? Where is Fish 
Alley, that horror to the nose, that perfume to the 
eye? Where are those broken, dingy streets, in 
which the Chinese made art of rubbish? 

I hope that some one will arise, before this gen- 
eration is passed, to record that conquest of affec- 
tion by which the California Chinese transformed 
themselves from our race-adversaries to our dear, 
subject people. Theirs will be all the glory of that 
tale, ours all the shame. In the dawn of the min- 
ing rush, the little, trading Cantonese began to 
appear in California. The American, the Celt, the 


[8] 


ARNOLD GENTHE 


Frenchman came for gold — gold washed out of the 
hills —uncounted millions. Gold brought the Chi- 
naman also; but his ideas were modest. ‘The pro- 
spect of two, four, five dollars a day was enough 
for him, who had made only ten cents a day at 
home. He asked simply to do menial work at a 
menial’s wage. Beside our white pioneers, he took 
his part in the glorious episode of the Pacific con- 
quest. He, with them, starved on the desert, died 
on the trails, faced Indian bullets and arrows. 
Wherever the report of gold called into being a 
new camp, he struggled in behind the whites, built 
his laundry, his cook-house or his gold rocker, 
girded up his pig-tail, and went to work. In his 
own spirit of quiet heroism, he shared all the hard- 
ships of our giant men — shared in everything they 
held except their dissipations and their reward of 
glory. For glory, he had to wait half a century. 
That curious, black episode of early Western 
civilization, the Chinese persecution, followed hard 
upon their first arrival. Why this thing began, 
what quality in the Chinese nature irritated our 
pioneers beyond all justice and sense of decency, 
remains a little dim and uncomprehended to this 
generation. [hey were an honest people — honest 
beyond our strictest ideas. [hey attended to their 
own business and did not interfere with ours. ‘Their 
immoralities, their peculiar and violent methods 
of adjusting social differences, affected only them- 
selves. Not for thirty years was there reason for 
believing them a danger to American workingmen. 
But the fact remains. Our pioneers cast them forth 
disgraced, beat them, lynched them. Professional 


[9] 


OLD CHILNASO Mya 


agitators made them a stock in trade. By the 
power of reiteration, this honest people came to 
figure in the public mind as a race of thieves, this 
cleanly people — inventors of the daily bath — as 
“dirty”? and “diseased,”’ this heroic people, possessed 
of a passive fortitude beside which our stoicism is 
cowardice, as poltroons. With a dignity all their 
own, they suffered and went about their business, 
though death lay at the end. 

The day came when the Chinese themselves 
nearly justified the professional labor agitator. 
The romantic, unsettled period of the gold rush 
passed into history; the age of bonanza farming 
followed; the state buckled down to stable industry. 
But two and three and five dollars a day was still 
a lure to the Canton man. ‘Their number increased 
with every Pacific steamer. Even yet they were 
no real menace to American labor — the state at 
any time might have swallowed up fifty thousand 
more without harming a single white workingman 
—but that menace lifted itself in the immediate 
future. Ripples from the black Dennis Kearney 
outrages, the shameful Montana massacres, reached 
Washington. Congress passed the Exclusion Law. 
When that happened, there vanished the last logical 
objection to the Californian Chinese. 

A gradual change passed over the spirit of Cali- 
fornia. We were a long time learning that human 
souls, different but equal, souls softened by forty 
centuries of highly moral civilization, lay under 
those yellow skins, under those bizarre customs and 
beliefs. “The Chinaman, being a gentleman, gives 
himself forth but charily. I think that we first 

[ 10 | 


Poe OED GEN THE 


glimpsed the real man through our gradual un- 
derstanding of his honesty. American merchants 
learned that none need ever ask a note of a China- 
man in any commercial transaction. His word is 
his bond. Precedent, as well as race characteristic, 
makes it so. 


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CARRYING NEW YEAR’ S PRESENTS 


CHAPTER TWO 


\/HE newer generation of Cali- 
| fornians grew up with baby- 
loving, devoted Chinese 
servants about them. The 
Sons and Daughters of the 
Golden West did not, indeed, 
draw their first sustenance 
from yellow breasts, as the 
Southerner has drawn it from 
black ones. That mystic 
bond was lacking. But a 
_ Chinese man-servant had 

» watched at the cradle above 
most of them, rejoiced with the parents that there 
was a baby in the house, laughed to see it laugh, 
hurried like a mother at its cry. A backyard picture 
in any of the old Californian mansions included 
always the Chinese cook, grinning from the doorway 
on the playing babies. 

This Chinese cook was a volunteer nurse; for 
him, the nursery was the heart of the house. He 
was the consoler and fairy-teller of childhood. 
He passed on to the babies his own wonder tales of 
flowered princesses and golden dragons, he taught 
them to patter in sing-song Cantonese, he saved his 


[27] 


OLD (CHINATO Wat 


frugal nickels to buy them quaint little gifts; and 
as the Southerner, despising the race, loves the 
individual negro through this very association of 
childhood, so the Californian came to love the 
Chinaman that he knew. In his ultimate belief, 
indeed, he outstripped the Southerner; for he 
came first to a tolerance of the race and then to 
an admiration. 

The older people, and more especially the house- 
wives among them, reached understanding and 
admiration through a different channel. The China- 
man was an ideal servant. Now, when the insolent 
and altogether less admirable Japanese are taking 
their places beside the cook stoves, your San Fran- 
cisco housewife will never cease lamenting for the 
old order. His respect for a contract, written or 
spoken, made him observe every article of the 
servant's code. Unobtrusive, comprehending in all 
its subleties the feminine mind, part of the house- 
hold and still aloof from it, the Chinese servant 
did the work of two American maids and stirred up 
no friction in the process. Supreme virtue of all 
to his mistress, he delighted in “‘company,” in all 
the pomps and parades of a household. Nothing 
pleased him more than to take the responsibility 
of a dinner or a reception upon himself, to plan con- 
fections for it, to have a hand in the decorations. 
The other side of his life, which might be frescoed 
with fan-tan and highbinder troubles, he kept for 
Chinatown and his night off. Perhaps on that 
night he dropped his month’s wages in the gam- 
bling houses of Ross Alley, perhaps he smoked a few 
pipes of opium, perhaps he knew more than the 

[ 28 ] 


Poe OE DG EIN EE 


police would ever learn of the highbinder shooting 
proclaimed all across the first page of that news- 
paper which he calmly handed you at breakfast. 
He never troubled you with these things. To you, 
he was first the perfect servant, and, if his term 
lasted long enough, the shy, and gentle familiar, 
versed in the arts of friendship. Who more gracious 
than your Chinese cook or laundryman calling on 
Chinese New Years, his hands full of lilies for the 
women of the family, his pockets of nuts for the 
children? So, out of family life, both child and 
parent learned to appreciate and love the race. 
The Chinese had conquered our foolish hatred by 
patient service. 


[29] 


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CHAPTER THREE 


OMMENCING like all Span- 
ish towns, San Francisco clus- 
tered first about a plaza 
— Portsmouth Square the 
pioneers renamed it. On its 
fringes, in the days when the 
streets ran gold and _ the 
Vigilantes were the whole 
aa \aw, appeared the first modern 
f buildings. Then, with the 
unaccountable, restless drift 

sl of American cities, shops and 
wholesale Feiss passed on down into the hollows 
and “‘made lands’’ reclaimed from the Bay 
marshes. The Chinese, following in, took posses- 
sion of those old buildings about Portsmouth 
Square. An unwritten city ordinance, strictly ob- 
served by successive Boards of Supervisors, held 
them to an area of about eight city blocks. Old 
St. Mary’s Church, the first Roman Catholic Cathe- 
dral, marked the southern edge of that area; and 
to the last day of the old city any report that the 
Chinese were moving south of St. Mary’s drove the 
newspapers and the city fathers to arms. The Chi- 


[ 43 ] 


OLD CHINATOWN 


nese conquest of affection never proceeded so far 
that the Americans wanted them for neighbors. 

These eight blocks, supporting a population which 
varied between ten thousand and thirty thousand 
according to the season of the year, lay close to the 
very center of San Francisco, between the business 
district and the old palaces of Nob Hill. Wealthy 
citizens, walking down to their offices from the 
citadel of the town, used to envy the Chinese their 
site; the city authorities were forever starting a 
movement to get “dirty Chinatown” out into the 
suburbs, that the whites might take the Quarter 
back. But the Chinese owned much of the prop- 
erty, and paid a high rental for the rest. With 
their conservatism and their persistence, they stuck. 
They stuck even after the fire, when San Francisco, 
starting a dozen projects in the heroic rebound 
of its spirit, tried to seize the occasion to move 
Chinatown. 

This district of old-fashioned business blocks, 
laid out on fine lines by the French architects who 
wrought before the newly-rich miners began to buy 
atrocities, the Chinese transformed into a sem- 
blance of a Chinese city. They added sheds, lean-tos, 
out-door booths, a thousand devices to extend space; 
they built in the eternal painted balconies of which 
the Chinaman is as fond as a Spaniard. Close 
livers by custom, they lodged twenty coolies in one 
abandoned law office; they even burrowed three 
stories underground that they might make space 
for winter-idle laborers, overflow of the northern 
canning factories. Clinging always to their native 
customs and dress and manners, they furnished 


[ 44] 


meNOLD GENT HE 


their little stores and factories, their lodging houses, 
their restaurants, with the Chinese utensils of com- 
mon life which were never without their touch of 
beauty. 

So the Quarter grew into a thing like Canton and 
still strangely and beautifully unlike. Dirty — the 
Chinaman, clean about his person, inventor of the 
daily bath, is still terribly careless about his sur- 
roundings. Unsanitary to the last degree — China- 
town was the care and vexation of Boards of Health. 
But always beautiful — falling everywhere into 
pictures. 

This beauty appealed equally to the plain citizen, 
who can appreciate only the picturesque, and 
to the artist, with his eye for composition, subtle 
coloring, shadowy suggestion. From every door- 
way flashed out a group, an arrangement, which 
suggested the Flemish masters. Consider that 
panel of a shop front in Fish Alley which is to me 
the height of Dr. Genthe’s collection. Such pic- 
tures glimpsed about every corner. You lifted your 
eyes. Perfectly arranged in coloring and line, you 
saw a balcony, a woman in softly gaudy robes, a 
window whose blackness suggested mystery. You 
turned to right or left; behold a pipe-bowl mender 
or a cobbler working with his strange Oriental tools, 
and behind him a vista of sheds and doorways in 
dim half tone, spotted with the gold and red of 
Chinese sign-boards. Beautiful and always myste- 
rious — a mystery enhanced by that green-gray 
mist which hangs always above the Golden Gate and 
which softens every object exposed to the caressing 
winds and gentle rains of the North Pacific. 

[45] 


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CHAPTER FOUR 


N the greatest of his short 
stories, Frank Norris said 
that there were three circles 
in Chinatown. ‘The first was 
the life of the streets, which 
never grew stale to the real 
Californian. The second was 
that prepared show which the 
tourist saw and which sup- 
ported those singular persons, 
the Chinatown guides. The 

. third was a circle away down 

“= i below, into which no white 
man, at least none who dared tell about it, ever pen- 
etrated — the circle which revolved about their 
trafhcking in justice, as they conceived of justice, 
about their trade in contra-band goods, such as 
opium and slave girls. 

Rather, I think, were there four circles, for in 
between the circle of Show Places and that of Hid- 
den Things came the family life and industrial 
activity of the Quarter. 

This Chinatown was a Tenderloin for the whole 
Chinese population of the Pacific Coast, the pleas- 
[ 67 | 


OL DD CHIEN Adon 


ure palace where fish cutters from the northern 
salmon canneries, farmers from the Sacramento 
deltas, fruit pickers from the hot San Joaquin, gold 
washers from the mountains, came to enjoy them- 
selves and to squander their earnings between 
seasons. Although a part of its reputed vicious- 
ness was the exaggeration of race hatred, no man 
could deny that it was tough. Also, it had gathered 
about it the lowest of those white tramps and sol- 
diers of ill fortune who haunted that terminus of 
Caucasian civilization, San Francisco. ‘The habita- 
tion of a darker race has an attraction for the de- 
based; witness the environs of negro streets in the 
South. Because “‘sin is news and news is sin,” this 
side of Chinatown was always before the public. 

Nevertheless, a real life of homes and quiet in- 
dustry went on there also. The Chinese overall, 
cigar and shoe factories were important enough to 
draw the hatred of labor unions for a generation. 
Much of the American tea and silk trade was con- 
trolled from those streets. The Six Companies, 
virtually the Chinese Chamber of Commerce — 
though bound by an alliance closer than any com- 
mercial organization which we know — had but to 
assert itself, and the whole Pacific Coast paid atten- 
tion. The merchants, as they grew rich, sent to 
China for their old wives, married new ones by 
proxy, slipped brides past the inspectors, bought 
them from the slave dealers. 

To a degree which we cannot comprehend, the 
place of the respectable Chinese woman is in 
the home. So the foreign American seldom saw 
the true lady of the Chinese Quarter. She lived 

[ 62 ] 


ARNOLD GENTHE 


close to her home, she bound her hair with sober 
fillets, she dressed quietly, and she went abroad 
only on great business or on the occasion of great 
festivals. 

But children, — high and low, rich and poor, they 
had the run of the streets. And they were the pride, 
joy, beauty and chief delight of the Quarter. Hope 
of heaven and everlasting worship to their fathers, 
nothing was too bright and beautiful for them. So 
mothers and nurses decked them out in the brightest 
tunics, the most cleverly conceived caps, all tinkling 
with golden devil-chasers, the whitest little socks 
and shoes, the most gorgeous ear-tassels, fit, other- 
wise, only for the altars of the joss. ‘Tiny, yellow 
flowers of the world — how the American women, 
native and tourist, used to crane their necks and 
smile and coo at them as they passed! With what 
pride the father— never the mother — used to 
carry the boy baby down the streets in all his finery! 
How the Chinese, child lovers from the bottoms of 
their hearts, used to pay them court on the corners! 
Usually, they were contented and rather stolid 
babies; only once in a blue moon did one of them 
cry. And when it happened that a baby cried on the 
streets, the Chinese, bargaining at the open shop 
fronts, used to look after him and grin and exchange 
comments in Cantonese sing-song as though it was 
the greatest joke in the world. 

School, whether in the Oriental schoolhouse which 
the city maintained or in the private Chinese semi- 
naries of the rich and conservative, was out by four 
o'clock. That was the brightest hour of all the 
day in those streets. Dupont and Washington and 

[ 63 ] 


OLD CHINATOWN 


Stockton blossomed with racing, tumbling babies, 
all bright in silks. The barber, the grocer, the 
butcher, the lantern maker, dropped tools and oc- 
cupation and came to the doorways to watch them 
play. The elder sisters walked arm on waist like 
school-girls the world over, swaying with that 
gentle motion which marks the Chinese lady from 
her common sister. The big boys, much more sub- 
dued than our own twelve year olds, got out those 
feathered shuttlecocks with which the Chinese 
youth imitates football, and frisked along Dupont 
Street or over into Portsmouth Square. A curious 
game that was, without team work or rules — noth- 
ing to it but dexterity of foot. Something essentially 
Oriental in its grotesque grace appeared in the atti- 
tudes of these boys as they kicked the ball, first 
forward like the punt of a Rugby player, and then 
backward over their shoulders like a French move- 
ment in Ja savate. Sometimes the more radical. 
mothers joined their babies after school, walked 
down to the Square — a fearful journey for them — 
and made a little picnic about the football players. 
That children’s hour of the Quarter showed China- 
town at its sweetest and most gracious. 

Once only, in my recollection, came a day when 
all the women, high and low, had free run of the 
streets. This was the Good Lady Festival, cele- 
brated every seven years in honor of that illustrious 
Chinese woman, princess and martyr, who was 
raised for her virtues to godhood. Her symbol is 
the little shoe, the tapering shoe of the lily feet, 
which she threw into the river before she died. And 
on the day of her festival, woman was raised to the 


[ 64 ] 


mesNOULD GENTHE 


level of man. She was free to walk the streets, to 
sacrifice, to bow publicly before the outdoor altars 
where priests tapped their little gongs and sang 
incessantly to the joss. The ‘Prayer store” on 
Dupont Street, where one might buy anything and 
everything sacred to Chinese religion, banked its 
counter and filled its windows with shoes of all sizes 
and colors. 

On that day, also, did the respectable woman 
wear those multi-colored robes, those trousers of 
pale, neutral shades, those jade and gold ornaments 
for the hair, publicly appropriate at other times 
only to the women of no caste. From the brass and 
cedar treasure chests kept carefully under the beds 
in their tiny flats, they took these festival clothes, 
saved, perhaps, since the wedding; and Chinatown 
became one blaze of color. Here, as everywhere 
else, fashions changed; one marked that phenome- 
non usually by the variations in the children’s 
caps and the colors and decorations of the tunics 
worn by the women. The black, straight hair, 
glossy with ointments, was usually bound by a 
great clasp of hammered gold which amounted — 
almost to a cap. 

Down the street, that night, walked a procession 
of priests in white robes. They carried a great 
banner inscribed with decorative Chinese charac- 
ters; to right and left of them walked stavemen 
bearing weapons of the old Empire. Behind fol- 
lowed the women, for all the world like a swaying 
bed of great, gaudy flowers. Along the sidewalks 
burned unnumbered sacrificial candles and lights, 
surrounding the roast pig and rice bowls of a 

7 [ 65] 


OLD CHINATOWN 


Chinese sacrifice. When the procession was over, 
the women, emancipate for the night, went to feast 
— those of no caste to the restaurants, the ladies 
to their somber homes. 

Next morning, when the careful priests of Con- 
fucius had picked up the papers on the streets and 
burned them, that the sacred characters might not 
be sullied by base uses, the women were back in 
their nests again, soberly dressed, keeping close that 
they might not dishonor their lords through the 
glance of forbidden eyes; and only the harlot and 
the very young maiden walked freely and frequently 
abroad until their next holiday. 


[ 66 ] 


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“THERE CAME A DAY WHEN ALL THE WOMEN, HIGH AND LOW, 
HAD FREE RUN OF THE STREETS” 


CHAPTER FIVE 


HEY love a fiesta, those 
Californian Chinese; four or 
five times a year, some fixed 
or movable feast brought 
out everything that was won- 
derful in the Quarter. Two 
or three of these holiday 
occasions linger in memory. 
On Stockton Street stood the 
clubhouse of a merchant 
organization only one whit 

: rai less powerful than the Six 

Companies. One in three years, this club cel- 
ebrated the glories of its joss and kept open house. 

The reception was for white and Chinese alike; in 
this time of peace and good will, they drew no color 
line. All races mixed in the crowd which packed their 
rooms to drink tea and scan the innumerable paper 
altars in honor of this immortal god or that dead hero. 
Mostly, these altars told, in flimsy paper statuettes 
and legends on red paper, some tale of old China. 

There, life size, was the great god, sitting in fearful 

state and casting forbidding eyes upon the priests 


[ 87 ] 


OLD CHINATOWN 


who sang before him with many _ prostrations. 
About him, stood a dismounted hero in the tasseled 
and feathered war bonnet of other days; the prin- 
cess his wife; a horse which was a caricature of an 
animal in shape and a wonder of art in blended 
coloring; the seven goddesses, gazing indifferently 
upon rich offerings of roast pig, incense and fruit. 

Near the entrance, in a recess of his own, sat the 
terrible and luck-bringing joss of the Tong. He is 
a devil as well as a god; he is beatifically kind and 
terribly cruel. His image is all white in face and 
clothing, but his eyes are weeping tears of blood. 
He is so lucky that just to touch him will make you 
win at lottery or fan-tan. He was much sought by 
the thievish; and between festivals the Tong kept 
him in a burglar proof vault. On this public oc- 
casion, when his owners brought him out to bless 
and help their guests, two white watchmen guarded 
him with club and gun. No Chinese watchman 
could be trusted, in face of that awful temptation 
to win everlasting prosperity at one stroke. 

Once, in this week of festivity, they brought him 
out on the streets. That was on the last night, 
when the elders of the Tong, in caps and long dress 
tunics, publicly distributed bread and meat to all 
the poor of Chinatown, whether white or yellow. 
Then, priests bore him high in air on their shoulders 
that he might radiate fortune on the unfortunate. 

I remember, too, a certain night in the annual fes- 
tival of devils, when the orthodox Chinaman purifies 
his house by a cannonade of firecrackers to keep 
away the evil spirits for another year. The air, in 
the Chinese cosmos, is full of devil people; a China- 

[ 88 ] 


ARNOLD GENTHE 


man wastes a deal of his time and energy worrying 
about them. At home, I believe, the very orthodox 
never make a straight entrance to any building — for 
devils cannot turn a corner, and a crooked entrance 
is a safeguard. Behold how superstition yields to 
convenience! The Chinese of San Francisco had 
adapted to their uses abandoned American stores 
‘and business blocks. It was inconvenient, almost 
impossible, to screen against devils the entrances 
of American-built stores. The practical China- 
man, therefore, gave up the doctrine of his creed, 
and took the more ardently to propitiatory sacrifices 
and offerings and devil-scaring firecrackers. And 
at the great devil feast, he fairly outdid himself in 
casting out all the works of evil, that his house might 
be clean for another year. 

On the night which I am recalling, a certain ob- 
servation upon the Chinese crystallized in my mind. 
Out of his mental difference from us, his oblique 
thinking as contrasted with our straight reason- 
ing, his subtlety as contrasted with our directness, 
his commercial honesty as contrasted with our com- 
parative commercial dishonor, his gentility as con- 
trasted with our rudeness; further, out of our wholly 
unnecessary persecution and race hatred, he has 
come to a superior contempt of us and our ways. 
Certain broad spirits among them look across the 
race line and regard us as human beings; certain 
humble personages among them, such as the old 
family retainers whom I have mentioned already, 
develop a curious, dog-like affection. But in the 
main, they feel a passive contempt. We were to 
them a medium of commerce when we stopped at 


[ 89 | 


OLD CHINATOWN 


the stores to buy; meddlers when we interfered with 
lotteries, fan-tan games, plague, highbinder wars 
and other affairs which were none of our business; 
plain pests when we swept down upon them with 
uniforms and patrol wagons, but always Things — 
never persons. You passed them on the streets; 
they turned out for you; but they glanced at you 
no more than they glanced at the innumerable sleek 
cats sunning themselves in the doorways. You 
might pick a specially beautiful or interesting China- 
man and stare at him all day; he would notice you 
no more than a post — unless you pulled a camera on 
him. A Chinese father would, indeed, soften if you 
stopped to pay court to the baby in his arms; it 
was too much to expect that he would refuse tribute 
from anything in the earth below or the air above 
to the pride of his heart and the hope of his immortal 
salvation. That, it seemed to me, was the only 
point at which your Chinese willingly granted inter- 
course to the despised race. 

But on that night, when the punk-sticks and the 
pocket altars burned at every corner and before 
every sweetmeat stand, when alleys were canopied 
over for the use of the priests, when windows glowed 
soft from the sacrificial lights within; on that night, 
when horror and mystery held the air — then you 
paid court to no Chinese baby. Approach him, 
and his father drew him sharply away; persist, 
and his bearer would hurry off in a panicky run. 
Pidgin English brought no answer to your most 
polite inquiries. The children imitated their elders; 
the big brother or sister, caring for little Ah Wu or 
tiny Miss Peach Blossom of the lily feet, scattered 

[90 | 


Pare OD GEN THE 


fearfully from the foreign touch. We, inferior, 
uncomprehending, were brothers to the powers of 
the air. Only this I noticed — your money was 
still welcome at the stores. Perhaps it was right 
to take devil tribute. 


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HAT is it which makes one 
picture of life linger in mem- 
ory while others, and more 
marvelous ones, fade out? 
Vividly I remember a dinner 
party which I saw that night. 
Perhaps I had with me a 
friend, whose identity is the 
one thing which has gone from 
me, but whose strong and 
stimulating pull on my mind 
lingers on this rise of memory 
to a permanent thing; per- 
haps that was one of those nights of youth when 
the world is right and life dances down before you, 
and all your powers are multiplied by some golden 
number of the gods. At any rate this picture re- 
mains, while greater and brighter things linger only 
in blurred outlines. 

It was on the top floor of the old Man Far Low 
Restaurant on Dupont Street, a show place it is 
true, but also the great café of the rich and disso- 
lute. That floor, running clear through the block, 
was a succession of private dining rooms, divided 
[ 109 |] 


OLD CHINATOWN 


one from the other by carved screens. The guests 
sat not on chairs, but upon square stools of teak 
wood. From the front apartment, you stepped out 
upon a balcony made into a little Chinese garden. 
This looked upon the dark stretch of Dupont Street. 
At the rear was another balcony, a small, undeco- 
rated thing; and from that you saw Portsmouth 
Square with its gilded caravel set in memory of 
Robert Louis Stevenson, and still further the 
golden delights of the great bay. One who came to 
enjoy the Man Far Low must buy at least tea and 
sweetmeats. [he tea, poured from the crack be- 
tween two bowls, one inverted over the other, was 
of a light lemon yellow, and fascinating to the taste. 
One ate the sweetmeats — picked ginger, preserved 
nuts, plums and citron — from the end of a spindly 
tin fork after failing in the effort to manipulate the 
ivory chop-sticks. When the guest had finished, the 
waiter stood at the head of the stairs and bawled 
something in Cantonese. ‘hat was the check; the 
cashier, sitting in round cap and horn spectacles 
at the desk below, knew by it how much to collect. 

That night, however, the Chinese occupied it; a 
great, expensive dinner was proceeding in the front 
apartment. At the biggest table sat a dozen Chinese 
men, very dignified as to dress, for they wore the 
long, silk tunic of ravishing neutral tint which is 
dress coat and frock coat both to a Chinese gentle- 
man. With each man sat his woman — not at the 
table, but just behind, so that she had to reach 
modestly over his shoulder to get at the viands in 
their toy porcelain bowls. When her lord’s appetite 
failed, she fed him with her plaything hands; when 

[ rzo | 


ARNOLD GENTHE 


he wanted a cigarette, she lighted it for him between 
her own painted lips. One of these women, I re- 
member, had a homely, irregular face, with a broad 
mouth, but with an illumination and expression in 
her features exceptional among Chinese women. 
A soubrette sauciness showed in her every gesture, 
but you felt that it was a measured impudence 
which knew its convenient bounds. Musicians, 
squatted on a woven straw couch in the corner, 
were playing a moon fiddle, a sam yin and a gong. 

Presently, the feast having reached the stage 
when food is less to the feaster than drink, they 
began to play “one-two.” I must explain that 
game, so simple and so appealing to the convivial. 
You challenge a partner. If he accepts, you throw 
out from your closed hand any number of fingers 
from one to four and call off in a loud tone of voice 
the proper number of fingers. He throws out the 
same number of fingers and calls the number after 
you. But at last you call out, craftily, any one 
number, and throw out a different number of fingers. 
And if, by calling that number after you, he shows 
that he has failed to watch your hand, he has lost; 
and he must drink a cup of rice brandy as a forfeit. 
He who first becomes drunk is “‘it.”” It goes faster 
and faster, until all the table is playing it in pairs. ° 
Seam = Sam!” “See!” “See!” “Yee!” “Yee!” 
“pam! “Sam!” Then a chorus of Oriental 
laughter, more crackling and subdued than ours; 
for the proponent, on “Sam” (three) has thrown 
forward only two fingers, and the opponent, falling 
into the trap has thrown out three. So he is 
caught, and down his throat goes the forfeit. 

Reed 


OLD CHINATOWN 


And as they drank and played, and played and 
drank, something deep below the surface came out 
in them. Their shouts became squalls; lips drew 
back from teeth, beady little eyes blazed; _ their 
very cheek bones seemed to rise higher on their 
faces. I thought, as I watched, of wars of the past; 
these were not refined Cantonese, with a surface 
gentility and grace in life greater than anything 
that our masses know; they were those old yellow 
people with whom our fathers fought before the 
Caucasus was set as a boundary between the dark 
race and the light; the hordes of Genghis Khan; 
the looters of Attila. 

The ‘‘its” fell out one by one, retired with some 
dignity to the straw couch and to sleep. She of 
the saucy, illuminated face crept close to her lord 
and whispered in his ear — she, like all her kind, 
was taking the moment of intoxication to ply her 
business; and the debauch was nearly over. Only 
when I was out on the street, and purged somewhat 
from the impression of Tartar fierceness which that 
game of “one-two” had given me, did this come 
into my mind: there had been not one unseemly 
or unlovely act in all that debauch of young bloods 
and soiled women, not one over-familiar gesture. 
Tartar though they had shown themselves, they 
had remained still Chinese gentlemen and Chinese 
ladies. 

These pretty and painted playthings of men 
furnished a glimpse into Frank Norris’s Third 
Circle, the underworld. We shall never quite un- 
derstand the Chinese, I suppose; and not the least 
comprehensible thing about them is the paradox of 

[ 112 | 


MeReNOLD GEN THE 


their ideas and emotions. On the anomalies of 
Chinese courage, for example, one might write a 
whole treatise. A Chinese pursued by a mob never 
fights back. He lies down and takes his beating 
with his lips closed. If he is able to walk when 
it is done, he moves away with a fine, gentlemanly 
scorn for his tormentors. To take another instance; 
at Steveston, in the mouth of the Frazer River, 
the white and Indian fisherman struck. The 
owners, supported by the Canadian militia, decided 
to man the boats with Oriental cannery laborers. 
The Japanese jumped at the chance. The Chinese, 
to a man, refused to go out on the river. They 
were afraid of it. Yet a Chinese merchant con- 
demned to death by the highbinders, aware that the 
stroke may come at any time from any alley, walks 
his accustomed way through the streets without 
looking to right or left. So it goes, all through their 
characters. Nothing fits our rules. 

By the same token, underneath their essential 
courtesy, fruit of an old civilization, underneath 
their absolute commercial honor, runs a hard, wild 
streak of barbarism, an insensibility in cruelty, 
which, when roused, is as cold-blooded and unlovely 
a thing as we know. 


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CHAPTER SEVEN 


HINATOWN, the Tender- 
loin for all the Western Chi- 
nese, lived not only by tea 
and rice and overalls and 
cigars and tourists, but also 
by the ministry to dissipation. 
It had gathered to itself the 
tough citizens, and especially 
the gamblers. Gambling is a 
darling sin to all the race; 
take his fan-tan counters and 
his pie-gow blocks away, and 
he will bet on the number of 

seeds in an uncut orange. With most, it is a mere 

diversion. Your efhcient, quiet houseboy will go into 

Chinatown on Saturday night, have his little whirl at 

fan-tan, smoke, perhaps, his one pipe of opium, and 

return in the morning none the worse for his social 
diversion. Others get the passion of it into their 
blood. One hears continually of this or that Chinese 
laborer, who, having saved for fifteen years to go 
back to China and live on his income, has dropped 
into a fan-tan house on the eve of his departure, 
lost his whole pile in one night, and returned, with 
[ 129 ] 


OLD CHINATOWN 


a great surface indifference, to begin a life of service 
over again. Fat and powerful waxed the keepers 
of gambling houses. They came to be controlling 
factors in the vicious side of Chinatown; and they 
gathered under them all the priests of vice into one 
alliance of crime and graft. Those who traded in 
slave girls, those who ran the cheap, internecine 
politics of the ward, those who lived by blackmail, 
and especially those gentlemen of fortune known 
as highbinders, whose reason for being was paid 
murder, lived and moved in the shadow of the 
gambling game. 

In the age of public exposures, we have discovered 
that the powers which we pay to keep order and 
virtue among us and the powers which minister to 
our dissipation have a mysterious affinity — that 
the policeman is constitutionally apt to unite him- 
self in a business way with those who live by vice. 
In this development of civilization we are as chil- 
dren beside the Chinese; and out of this situation 
grew the highbinders, adventurers in crime. For 
they were not only criminals; they were formal and 
recognized agents of justice. Crime and punish- 
ment had become tangled and involved beyond any 
power of ours to separate them and straighten them 
out. The constituted police of San Francisco 
struggled with this paradox for a generation long; 
and, finally, perceiving that the Chinese would 
settle their own affairs in their own way, gave it up 
and let the thing go. They kept only such interest 
in the Quarter — these Caucasian police — as would 
permit them to gather that rich graft which made a 
Chinatown beat a step toward fortune. 


[ 130 | 


ARNOLD GENTHE 


The Chinese have a positive talent for organiza- 
tion. They do everything, from running a store to 
keeping up public worship, by companies. Your 
insignificant Chinese shop-keeper may belong to a 
half dozen tight, oath-bound organizations — social, 
religious, financial, protective. 

I wonder if I can convey the process by which, 
in this transplanted Orient, assassins combined with 
justice to keep social order? Be it known that the 
Chinese has the most haughty contempt for our 
law. He seldom appeals to it; when he does, look 
out for some deeper plot. Perhaps he is not wholly 
in error; he has perceived how easily a clever lawyer 
can beat American courts. Aloof from our laws, 
then, and still apart from the laws of the Orient, 
these perpetual foreigners had to create some sys- 
tem of justice and punishment among themselves. 
Of this justice and punishment, the highbinders, 
criminals themselves, are also the executioners. 

Suppose, then, that you are Wong Kip, Chinese 
merchant, and that one steals from you, or commits 
the fearful crime of repudiating a just debt. You 
do not bother with the American courts. If the 
thing is bad enough to warrant the trouble, you or 
your Tong-man negotiate with a Bow On or Suey 
Sing highbinder. For a sum varying according 
to your needs and resources, the hired assassin gets 
out his gun. 

One night, the man who has injured you walks 
fair and straight through the streets of Chinatown; 
and a shadow falls in behind him. The shadow 
glances right and left to make sure that no white 
person is watching. The Chinese spectators — 


[137] 


OLD CHINATOWN 


they do not matter. The shadow walks with his 
hands tucked, muff fashion, in his long sleeves. 
They two, avenger and victim paired, reach a dark 
spot by awning or alley. The shadow creeps up 
close; his hands fly suddenly apart; a revolver goes 
off; the sacrifice to justice crumples up on the 
pavement. The murderer, with the motion of a 
quarter-back passing the ball, tosses the revolver 
to another Chinese; it goes on from hand to hand. 
When the police come at last, the murderer is chat- 
tering with the crowd about the body, and that 
revolver lies in an entrance a half a block away. 
Twenty Chinese saw it done and know who did it. 
Will they testify to it in court? Not as they value 
their lives — not even if they are brothers of the 
dead. 

Only — and here comes the imperfection in jus- 
tice of this kind — the brothers and Tong comrades 
of the executed felon often question the verdict and 
take an appeal. Hiring a highbinder from another 
Tong, they mark the man who put the wheels of 
justice into motion — or one of his Tong; it is nearly 
the same thing — and hold an execution on their 
own account. This may lead to more reprisals 
and still more, an endless chain. 

Such is the highbinder situation in one of its 
simplicities. But the further you follow it the more 
complex it becomes. In the first place, these Chi- 
nese toughs, like white toughs, grow restive under 
peace. When no employment offers, they start 
trouble among themselves. The Bow Ons and the 
Suey Sings were eternally straining each at the 
other. An insult, a quarrel over fan-tan or the price 

[ 132 ] 


ARNOLD GENTHE 


of a slave girl, might set off the mine. There 
might, too, be a real grievance. It might be a mis- 
tress that had deserted her Bow On lover and taken 
up with a Suey Sing. Here, as elsewhere, women 
played ducks and drakes with the affairs of men. 
The offended Suey Sing man would slaughter a 
Bow On. Not of necessity the offending Bow On; 
anyone would do who wore the hated badge. The 
Bow Ons, touched in their soldier pride, would even 
up the score; the Suey Sings would dispute that the 
score was even and pick off another Bow On; and 
the war would begin. Where were our police all 
this time? “‘Baffled.”” The Chinese took care of 
that. The blue devils who jumped from the noisy 
wagon would arrest the “‘suspicious loiterers” 
whom they found about the corpse, keep them awhile, 
and let them go for lack of evidence. 

Further to complicate the mess, these highbinders 
had a way of playing foul with their own clients. 
Constitutional blackmailers, they lived, between 
wars, on the terror which their name inspired. An 
order for an assassination might always be turned 
into blackmail money. The executioner would 
approach his marked man with a polite, Oriental 
translation of ‘‘ Dilly, Dilly, come here and be killed.” 
When the condemned felon had pleaded enough, the 
executioner would promise to let him go upon pay- 
ment of a weekly fine. The poor actors in the two 
theaters, men of no standing whatsoever among 
their countrymen, suffered terribly from this high- 
binder game. ‘The slave girls were always falling 
in love with actors and finding ways to meet them. 
‘This offense, in the law of custom, meant death for | 


[ 133] 


OLD CHINATOWN 


the actor. The highbinders watched these little 
games, got evidence, and, by threats of reporting 
to the legitimate owners of the girls, kept the actors 
penniless. : : 

A highbinder war tended to go on and ever on. 
It ended, usually, in a general adjustment brought 
about by intervention of the Six Companies. Once, 
a war got beyond all power of this supreme Chinese 
tribunal in the Occident, and came to trouble the 
Imperial Master in Peking. The See Yups represent 
- the laboring class, the “unions,’”’ in Chinatown, and 
the Sam Yups the capitalists. In the early nineties, 
disputes about the price of labor grew into a general 
strike of all the shoe, overall and cigar operatives. 
When the strike reached that stage when Occidental 
strikers began to picket and to loosen entertainment 
committees, one side or the other called in the high- 
binders. So wide were the interests involved, so 
bitter were both the Sams and Sees, that this became 
a general war, with weekly murders in sheaves of 
twos and threes. It lasted a year, it sent Chinese 
merchants into bankruptcy by the score, and it 
paralyzed all industries except the tourist trade. 
Its climax came when the highbinders lined up in 
opposite doorways of Ross Alley, the narrow, over- 
hung street of the gamblers, and fought until the 
police reserves charged in between. 

At about the same critical period in this war, the 
See Yups bagged a general. “Little Pete,” Chinese 
millionaire, gambler and man of affairs, had been 
lord of that little parish. A mere coolie in the begin- 
ning, he had the golden touch; he made everything 
pay. He formed a kind of gambling trust in the 

[ 134] 


Pero Ol) iGE- NP HE 


Quarter, and went out after the Caucasian racing 
game. He had played at Chinese gambling like 
Riley Grannan — cold, calculating, without excite- 
ment, making the real gambler pay. Just so he 
played the races, until he had mastered that game 
and was ready to corrupt it —if it had been possible 
to corrupt Californian racing. Only when a great 
scandal broke out in the affairs of the California 
Jockey Club did the whites discover that a system 
of pulling horses and permitting “‘long shots’ to 
win, a system which had been suspected for some 
time, was conceived and conducted solely by “Little 
Pete.” 

Little Pete was a Sam Yup. The See Yups, 
whose paid highbinders were running behind the 
score, put a heavy price on the head of this promi- 
nent citizen. He sat one afternoon in a barber’s 
chair, having his ears scraped. ‘Two bullets, fired 
through the open door, caught him in the back and 
finished him. 

His funeral was the greatest public ceremonial 
that Chinatown ever saw. Echoes from its gongs 
reached the Chinese Empire. The Consul General 
got orders to make this foolishness stop. He failed; 
the war, the state of bankruptcy, went on. The 
Minister removed him. His successor had no more 
luck. Finally, the Minister put in Ho Yow, Ox- 
ford graduate, brother-in-law of Wu Ting Fang, 
member of a progressive family, a man who under- 
stood the whites and the Chinese alike. 

Ho Yow studied the situation and sent represen- 
tations to China. Suddenly, in scattered districts 
of Canton, certain innocent persons found them- 


[ 135] 


OLD CHANA TOW 


selves under arrest. These were the relatives, 
even to the third degree, of the men responsible for 
this war in San Francisco. He served notice on 
See Yups and Sam Yups alike that any more murders 
in Chinatown would be avenged upon the persons 
of these Cantonese relatives. This ended the war 
with a bang; before the Consul General and the 
Six Companies, capital and labor made peace. This 
heroic measure discouraged, temporarily, the high- 
binder industry. The threat of arrests in China, 
shaken at the Tongs, has more than once been a 
restorative of order. 


[ 136 ] 


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Ra HE underground passages of 
Chinatown have appealed 
mightily to the imagination 
of melo-dramatists, authors 
of sensational tales, writers 
for the Eastern press, and 
others who guide and stimu- 
late the popular imagination. 
Although some declare them 
a myth, those passageways of 
the Third Circle really did ex- 
ist atone time. Their end an- 
tedated the great fire. In the late nineties, a Board 
of Health, appointed by the last honest municipal 
government which the old city knew, forestalled 
epidemics by going through the Quarter with war- 
rant and deputy. Against the diplomacies and 
concealments of the Chinese, the inspectors closed 
up cellar after cellar, filled in passage after passage. 
A few, effectually hidden from that Board of Health 
or restored later, remained to the end. Still those 
who knew old Chinatown marveled, when they 
looked into the gaping cellars left by the fire, to see 
how little of this mole-work remained. 


[753] 


OLD CHINATOWN 


So wide was this maze, in earlier days, that a 
Chinese who knew his way might travel by it from 
almost any point in Chinatown to almost any other. 
A reporter who held the confidence of the Chinese 
has told me how he subnavigated the Quarter during 
the quarantine of 1g01. ‘The Federal doctors, sus- 
pecting bubonic plague, had drawn a line tight about 
Chinatown; and, since Federal and not municipal 
authorities were doing this thing, the prohibition 
against passing the lines was absolute. 

A Chinaman, caught outside himself, said to this 
reporter: “I take you.” They entered the little 
den of a white cobbler in California Street. The 
cobbler, after a whispered exchange of words, 
opened a trap door under his counter. The Chinese 
guide, crouching in the shadow, lighted a red paper 
lantern; and down a ten-foot ladder they went. - 
The rest was a bewilderment of knife-edge passage- 
ways, stoops, ladders; sudden encounters with 
closed doors, from behind which came murmurs of 
a mysterious life within; glimpses of other pedes- 
trians in those underground streets. Once, they 
passed through a moldy lodging house, its walls 
dripping with exhalations of the earth, its day-shift 
of inmates peering out at them in wonder; once 
they came upon a latticed window, strangely futile 
in this unlighted world, through which the reporter 
saw slatternly women working with something on 
the floor — doubtless they were rolling, for warmed- 
over consumption, the scrapings of opium pipes. 
Once, he thought he heard the sound of moaning. 
Rumors of plague were in the air. It came to him 
that this might be some one sick unto death with it. 


[154] 


Poe Ot DG ENT HE 


The sense of darkness and confinement made the 
thought of contagion by Black Death doubly terrible; 
it was as though he were shut in a dungeon alone 
with a specter. 

They came at last square up against a rough 
wooden wall. The guide fumbled and scratched 
and a panel slid back. A drop of three feet brought 
them into a cellar; from there they walked out of a 
Chinese grocery store into the full daylight of the 
Quarter. When the reporter had looked about to 
his satisfaction, the guide said: “‘You go back 
notha’ way.” Starting from a lodging house next 
door to the grocery, they traversed more drops and 
rises, dark passages, hidden apartments, and came 
out in a cellar of the Latin quarter. They had 
walked all the way under Chinatown. 

Another man has told me how he rambled through 
some of these passages with a Chinese acquaintance 
—this was a mere visit of curiosity. When, be- 
wildered and utterly lost, he declared that he had 
had enough of foul air and suggestion of mystery, 
his guide mounted a ladder and scratched at a trap 
door. It opened; and they were in the kitchen of 
the Jackson Street Chinese Theater, with the gongs 
of a Chinese orchestra clanging on the stage above 
their heads. 

The exchange of opium, smuggled in from Pacific 
ships by bay pirates; the heartless slave trade; 
the preparation of bodies for convenient return to 
their ancestral grave mounds; the hidden revenges 
of the highbinders — all went on in these cata- 
combs, twenty feet below the pavement of Dupont 
and Washington Streets. 

[7155] 


iw DEVIL S  KLT CHEN 


“THE MOST DILAPIDATED HOLE IN CHINATOWN” 


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CHAPTER NINE 


HE world knows from Chris- 
tian missionaries how little 
the careless and criminal, 
among the Chinese at home, 
wawue.(-a cir) baby.« The 
sale of such children is an 
mi, established custom — born 

of ~ of the low esteem in which 
women are held, and of the terrible Chinese famines. 
Those Californian Chinese, who were degraded enough 
to stoop to such things, sold these babies into a 
life of shame. So small was the supply, owing 
to the difficulty of smuggling women past Federal 
inspection, that prices were high; it paid a coolie 
woman to bear female children. A girl four years 
old, past the delicate stage of infancy, would 
bring from fifteen hundred to two thousand dol- 
lars as a speculation. At thirteen or fourteen, 
when she was of age to begin making returns to 
her owner, her price was three thousand. Slavery 
it was, literal and hopeless; and that in face of 
the Fourteenth Amendment. ‘The Federal authori- 
ties tried to break it up. Pretty generally, they 
failed. The trouble lay in the Chinese contempt 
[ 165] 


OLD CHINATOWN 


for our courts. Snatch a girl from a brothel, and 
what happened? A slave from babyhood, kept 
in ignorance of any other world than that of her 
brothel, she believed the word of her keeper when 
he said that white men want girls only to pickle 
their eyes and eat their brains. First, one must 
win her from that idea. Then, the master would 
always bring action in the courts through certain 
white attorneys unscrupulous enough to take such 
cases. Chinese witnesses would be found to go upon 
the stand and swear that this girl was a daughter 
or niece of the master; and the poor girl, the moment 
she faced her master in court, would fall into the 
custom of a lifetime, quail before his eye, and swear 
falsely that these witnesses told the truth — that 
she wanted to go back to her “uncle.” This sys- 
tem, shameful in our eyes — though indeed there 
are institutions just as cold-blooded and evil in our 
own social structure — existed from the first day of 
Chinatown; exists, I make no doubt, to-day. 

From a woman, and she a pretty, fair-spoken 
Scotch maiden, this slave trade took its hardest 
blow. Donaldine Cameron was a girl of twenty 
when she came to take charge of the Presbyterian 
Mission, which concerns itself especially with the 
lives and souls of Chinese women. She says herself 
that she inherited her tastes and talents from a line 
of Scotch parsons grafted on a line of sheep-stealing 
Camerons. The spirit in her led her straight to 
the slave trade. First, as all her predecessors had 
done, she tried the police and the courts. She 
found the police inefficient or venal, the courts 
ineffective. She saw girl after girl, who had wel- 

[ 166 ] 


ARNOLD GENTHE 


comed rescue in the beginning, crumple up on the 
witness stand and swear herself back into slavery. 

Nevertheless, Miss Cameron kept on, raiding and 
fighting in the courts. In a warfare of ten years, 
she won a kind of Fabian victory. She usually 
lost her girl in the end, but before that end she had 
cost the owner dear in smashed doors, valuable 
property kept idle, disturbance of business, and the 
heavy fees which the white attorneys used to exact 
from the Chinese. Playing her desperate lone 
hand, she reduced the trafic by about one-half. 

Our lives in old San Francisco were all tinged a 
little with romance; but I can think of no life 
among us which so quivered with adventure as 
hers. Would that I could convey the quaint, work- 
aday style in which this Scotch gentlewoman related 
her adventures — the material of a dime novel, 
the manner of a housewife telling about her market- 
ing. During one raid, she met at the door of the 
brothel some unforeseen barrier which delayed the 
attack. As she waited for the axman, she looked 
through the latticed window upon a confusion of 
painted Chinese women, all squalling together. 
From this group, a girl disentangled herself and 
came running, her arms outstretched, toward the 
raiders. It was the girl they had come to rescue; 
and by this fatal slip, born of over-eagerness, she 
revealed that she was first cause of the raid. The 
slave master perceived it, too; before Miss Cameron’s 
eyes he knocked her down and dragged her by the 
hair through a sliding panel, which opened at his 
touch. When at last Miss Cameron gained entrance, 
she found a dozen passages leading confusingly from 


[ 167 | 


OLD CHINATOWN 


this secret door; the inmates had lost themselves in 
the Third Circle. She never saw that girl again; 
but months later the underground gossip of China- 
town brought Miss Cameron the end of the tale. 
The master had beaten her to death in the presence 
of his other women. 


[ 168 | 


RESCUED SLAVE. GIRLS 


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CHAPTER TEN 
AN the lover of Old China- 


town ever fail to keep in 
memory its characters and 
scenes, the gay colors and 
mysterious shadows? Un- 
forgettable is the figure of 
the strangest of the white 
inhabitants of Chinatown 
who was known as the Em- 
peror of the Universe. He 
was the mildest, gentlest 
paranoiac that ever fol- 
| lowed the moon. For years 
he walked the streets; a tall old man, with one of 
the sparse beards which Heaven grants to but few 
Chinese. Always, as he walked, he smoked a long, 
curved pipe and turned a look of kindly disdain 
upon the populace. He believed that all these 
Whites and Chinese were his subjects; but he was a 
benevolent ruler, well content with his domain. 
For that reason, and also because everyone liked him, 
no one ever took the trouble to lock him up. The 
Central Police Station came to inhabit the Hall of 
Justice across Portsmouth Square. At four o’clock 


[185 ] 


OLD CHINATOWN 


on fine days, the downtown squad used to deploy 
on the sidewalk. The Emperor was always there. 
He would walk down the line with the air of a general 
reviewing his troops, salute formally and march 
back to Chinatown. When the captain in com- 
mand was good-natured, he let his policemen return 
the salute — which they did with all gravity in the 
world. 

Who can ever forget the pipe-bowl mender, the 
pipe-bowl mender who sat in the same spot — on 
Dupont Street a few doors from Jackson — for a 
decade long? A picture always, what with his bow- 
string bits, his tiny hammers, his leather cases, he 
was most a picture on cold days when he got out his 
marten-lined jacket from the family inheritance, 
and his fur cap. In the short-lived drama, “The 
First Born,” which so enchanted San Francisco, 
Power the author and Benrimo the actor made 
this pipe-bowl mender chorus to all the things which 
happened on a certain tragic Chinatown night. 
Who forgets the Pekin Two Knife Man who used to 
perform a sword dance of the Old Empire? Who 
forgets that withered wisp of a Confucian priest 
whose task it was to gather day by day all the 
papers on the streets, that the name of the god- 
sage might never be profaned? Who forgets Ah 
Chic of the splendid, noble face, the greatest actor 
(I verily believe) of all his time in America — Ah 
Chic who lived and died in the Jackson Street theatre, 
playing seven nights a week for the pure love of 
playing, to coolies who could never understand? 
Who forgets the lantern maker, he who plaited 
moons of red and gold delight out of paper and 

[ 186 | 


ARNOLD GENTHE 


bamboo strips, betraying the artist in all those 
devices by which he made each one a little different 
from the other? 

Gentle figures whose memory will linger all the 
more unforgettably, since their old environment 
is gone. 


[ 187] 


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[THE FAIRMONT HOTEL IN THE DISTANCE] 


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EAR WILL IRWIN: It was the 
evening before my departure 
from San Francisco, just about 
a year ago. I had strolled down 
to Chinatown for a last visit. 
In the glare of blazing shop 
fronts, in the noise of chugging 
automobiles carrying sightseers, 
I again, as so many times be- 
fore, found myself trying to see 
the old mellowness of dimly-lit 
alleys, the mystery of shadowy 

3 | figures shuffling along silently. —I 
was Pi Atecrapted by the officious voice of a guide: 
“Show you all the sights of Chineetown, Sir! 
Opium-dens, slave-girls, jewelry-shops, joss-houses, 
everything.” The idea of seeing Chinatown for 
once as an average tourist appealed to me. | 
followed the guide. 

At last I, who for years had tried to deceive 
myself with sentimental persistency — just as one 
searches for traces of lost beauty in a beloved face — 
was forced to admit that Old Chinatown, the city 
we loved so well, is no more. A new City, cleaner, 
better, brighter, has risen in its place. 


[ 205 ] 


OULD CHINATEOW? 


On brilliantly illuminated streets, smoothly as- 
phalted, filled with crowds in American clothes, 
stand imposing bazaars of an architecture that 
never was, blazing in myriads of electric lights. 
Costly silk embroideries in gaudy colors, porcelains 
of florid design, bronzes with hand-made patina, 
and a host of gay Chinese and Japanese wares which 
the wise Oriental manufactures for us barbarians, 
tempt the tourist to enter, while inside cash-registers 
and department-store manners, replacing abacus 
and old-time courtesy, indicate up-to-date methods. 
In one store the Chinese owner even wears a proud 
tuxedo. Yet even to-day, in these ware-houses of 
quite modern Oriental art, as well as in the modest 
store of the small dealer next door, may the patient 
searcher discover a precious bit of lacquer, a 
charming piece of brocade. 

The theatre, in which Ah Chic had delighted our 
hearts with his wonderful art, and where so many 
times we had tried to discover expressive rhythm and 
leit-motifs in the din of the Chinese orchestra, has 
ceased to exist. The endowment is lacking. An 
‘Oriental Theater,’ a moving picture show, fills its 
place. Nothing is Chinese there except part of the 
audience. The joss houses where young and old 
used to worship strange divinities, are rebuilt with 
some lavishness, and the old gods, attired in bright 
new robes and glittering tinsel, are once more 
ensconced in their gilded temples. But who may 
guess their sacred trepidation? Had they not lost a 
great deal of their erstwhile prestige, when ignomin- 
iously they failed to save themselves and Chinatown 
in the great fire! The Street of the Gamblers has 

| 206 | 


ARNOLD GENTHE 


become a street of indifferent rooming-houses, and 
the Street of the Slave Girls has been translated into 
unsavory French. Opium dens are invisible, since 
the police has closed them all and destroyed in a 
virtuous holocaust — just as was done throughout 
all China — every pipe they could gather. Thanks 
to the Police and Board of Health, all that remains 
of the underground passages, where crime and mys- 
tery lurked in impenetrable shadows, is the lurid 
tale of the guide. In the goldsmith-shops on Dupont 
and Jackson Streets the hammers are busy, for 
Chinese vanity continues to demand gold orna- 
ments decorated with jade. Yet old patterns and 
careful workmanship are often giving way to new 
designs and indifferent methods. The most note- 
worthy sight of the new Chinatown seems to be the 
small’ store where souvenirs of the great fire are 
sold by an American woman whose sister bears an 
illustrious name and whose husband is a Chinaman. 

Of the old life of Chinatown only three things 
remain unchanged: in the drug-stores, just as of 
old, aromatic herbs and unknown roots, gall of 
bear and horn of deer, small dried animals of land 
and sea and other weird things can be _ pur- 
chased, to be concocted into an all-curing tea; the 
pawn-shop sign still indicates the place where old 
embroideries, fur-lined coats and jade bracelets 
have found a temporary abiding place; and the in- 
evitable Tong feuds carried on by lawless highbind- 
ers still furnish excitement to the Quarter and 
thrilling reading for the papers. It was in one of 
these recent Tong wars that our philosophical friend 
the old Fortune-Teller was killed by a hired assassin. 

[ 207 | 


OLD CHINA TOWA® 


Do you remember how his prediction “by-an’-by 
you catchee plenty money, may-be”’ used to appeal 
to you? As for the restaurants, there are several 
where Chinese tea and sweetmeats and Chop Suey 
are served to tourists; the old Far Low restaurant 
has even made quite a laudable attempt to re- 
establish the old order. Alas! it is in vain. The 
charm, the color, the atmosphere are gone. And 
that is true of the whole Quarter. 

We both were bad prophets when on that memo- 
rable night five years ago, under the ruined walls of 
St. Mary’s, we discussed the future of the newly 
rising Chinatown. We did not foresee that a force 
more destructive than fire, the spirit of revolution 
that has made the Chinese Republic a reality, was 
to abolish in a short time, what we had hoped would 
remain Chinese. Now everywhere American clothes 
replace the silken gowns of old, and a general ambi- 
tion to be “American” in manners as well as in 
appearance is evident. 

When the Chinese, from consul down to coolie, 
as outward sign of having broken with the traditions 
of their country, cut off their queues, Old Chinatown 
died. And if we, you with your pen and I with my 
camera, have caught some of its old picturesque | 
charm, adding perhaps here and there a touch of 
poetry to the mere fact, we may in all modesty feel 
that we have done something of value, for which 
San Francisco’s friends -will be grateful. 


ARNOLD GENTHE. 
1912. 


[ 208 ] 


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